Originally published in the Edmonton Journal on October 10, 2025
A recent article on the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation (EOCF) 50/50 program has generated headlines, prompting the foundation to issue its own statement. But what matters more is the bigger picture — the way Canadians often misunderstand and, too frequently, undermine their own charitable sector.
The EOCF 50/50 is a success story by any measure: $20 million raised for local charities in a single year, more than double the amount generated in the entire four-year period before the program moved online. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of investment in technology, marketing, compliance, customer support, and yes — risk.
These are not excesses. They are the very tools that transformed a small in-arena raffle into the largest charitable raffle in professional sports.
Yet time and again, we see this same pattern. When charities invest in overhead, we call it waste. When they hire skilled staff, we call it bureaucracy. When they spend money on marketing, we call it self-promotion. And when they take bold risks to grow, we call it reckless. We hold them to a standard no business could ever meet — and then we’re surprised when charities struggle to achieve scale.
Dan Pallotta, in his book Uncharitable and his famous TED Talk, put it bluntly: “We love innovation in business, but we punish it in charity.” In every other sector, risk is recognized as the price of progress. Companies routinely take chances on new products, new markets and new strategies.
Some fail, some succeed, but it’s this willingness to experiment that drives growth. Charities, by contrast, are expected to play it safe. Boards and donors are conditioned to avoid risk at all costs. The result is that the boldest ideas — the ones that could raise millions — often never leave the starting line.
The EOCF 50/50 defied that mindset. It embraced risk, invested in professional infrastructure and scaled to a level no one thought possible. The payoff? Tens of millions of dollars are flowing into Alberta communities that would never have existed otherwise. To reduce that to a debate about expense ratios is to miss the forest for the trees. The investment has paid off for Albertans that need it most.
This isn’t just about one hockey raffle. It’s about how we think about charity in Canada. Our sector is trapped by outdated rules, outdated reporting requirements and outdated attitudes that treat charities like second-class organizations.
We need to free them to act more like the engines of social innovation they truly are. That means giving boards and donors permission to tolerate risk, applauding — not attacking — ambition, and judging organizations by their impact, not their inputs.
The irony of the EOCF 50/50 is that it should be a model to replicate, not a target to attack. It has shown how to harness fan passion, community spirit, technology and professional execution to generate unprecedented support for local causes. That’s not a controversy. That’s a glimpse of what’s possible when we let charities think big.
The question Canadians should be asking is not, “Why did it cost money to raise this money?” The question should be, “How can we create more fundraising engines like this across the country?”
Because $20 million for local charities in a single year is not a problem to be explained away. It’s the future of Canadian philanthropy — and if we want charities to solve big problems, we need to let them think big, spend big, and yes, take big risks.
Michael Burns serves on the volunteer board of the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation. He is executive chair of Canada’s Valour Games and was previously president and CEO of the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation and CEO of the 2017 Invictus Games Toronto among other executive leadership roles in the non-profit sector.
